Primal Sound (1919)

Primal Sound (1919)

Rainer Maria Rilke

It must have been when I was a boy at school that the
phonograph was invented. At any rate it was at that
time a chief object of public wonder; this was proba¬
bly the reason why our science master, a man given to
busying himself with all kinds of handiwork, encour¬
aged us to try our skill in making one of these instru¬
ments from the material that lay nearest to hand. Noth¬
ing more was needed than a piece of pliable cardboard
bent to the shape of a funnel, on the narrower orifice
of which was stuck a piece of impermeable paper of the
kind used to bottle fruit. This provided a vibrating mem¬
brane, in the middle of which we stuck a bristle from a
coarse clothes brush at right angles to its surface. With
these few things one part of the mysterious machine was
made, receiver and reproducer were complete. It now
only remained to construct the receiving cylinder, which
could be moved close to the needle marking the sounds
by means of a small rotating handle. I do not remem¬
ber what we made it of; there was some kind of cylinder
which we covered with a thin coating of candle-wax to
the best of our ability. Our impatience, brought to a pitch

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by the excitement of sticking and fitting the parts, as we
jostled one another over it, was such that the wax had
scarcely cooled and hardened before we put our work to
the test.

How now this was done can easily be imagined. When
someone spoke or sang into the funnel, the needle in
the parchment transferred the sound-waves to the re¬
ceptive surface of the roll slowly turning beneath it, and
then, when the moving needle was made to retrace its
path (which had been fixed in the meantime with a coat
of varnish), the sound which had been ours came back
to us tremblingly, haltingly from the paper funnel, un¬
certain, infinitely soft and hesitating and fading out al¬
together in places. Each time the effect was complete.
Our class was not exactly one of the quietest, and there
can have been few moments in its history when it had
been able as a body to achieve such a degree of silence.
The phenomenon, on every reception of it, remained as¬
tonishing, indeed positively staggering. We were con¬
fronting, as it were, a new and infinitely delicate point in
the texture of reality, from which something far greater
than ourselves, yet indescribably immature, seemed to
be appealing to us as if seeking help. At the time and
all through the intervening years I believed that that in¬
dependent sound, taken from us and preserved outside
of us, would be unforgettable. That it turned out other¬
wise is the cause of my writing the present account. As
will be seen, what impressed itself on my memory most
deeply was not the sound from the funnel but the mark¬
ings traced on the cylinder; these made a most definite
impression.

I first became aware of this some fourteen of fifteen

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years after my school-days were past. It was during
my first stay in Paris. At that time I was attending the
anatomy lectures in the Ecole des Beaux- Arts with con¬
siderable enthusiasm. It was not so much the manifold
interlacing of the muscles and sinews nor the complete
inner agreement of the inner organs with another that
appealed to me, but rather the bare skeleton, the restrained
energy and elasticity of which I had already noticed when
studying the drawings of Leonardo. However much I
puzzled over the structure of the whole, it was more
than I could deal with; my attention always reverted to
the study of the skull, which seemed to me to consti¬
tute the utmost achievement, as it were, of which this
chalky element was capable; it was as if it had been per¬
suaded to make just in this part a special effort to render
a decisive service by providing a most solid protection
for the most daring feature of all, for something which,
though itself narrowly confined, had a field of activity
which was boundless. The fascination which this par¬
ticular structure had for me reached such a pitch finally,
that I procured a skull in order to spend many hours of
the night with it; and, as always happens with me and
things, it was not only the moments of deliberate atten¬
tion which made this ambiguous object really mine: I
owe my familiarity with it, beyond doubt, in part to that
passing glance, with which we involuntarily examine
and perceive our daily environment, when there exists
any relationship at all between it and us. It was a pass¬
ing glance of this kind which I suddenly checked in its
course, making it exact and attentive. By candlelight-
which is often so peculiarly alive and challenging-the
coronal suture had become strikingly visible, and I knew

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at once what it reminded me of: one of those unforgotten
grooves, which had been scratched in a little wax cylin¬
der by the point of a bristle!

And now I do not know: is it due to a rhythmic pecu¬
liarity of my imagination, that ever since, often after the
lapse of years, I repeatedly feel the impulse to make that
spontaneously perceived similarity the starting point for
a whole series of unheard of experiments? I frankly con¬
fess that I have always treated this desire, whenever it
made itself felt, with the most unrelenting mistrust-if
proof be needed, let it be found in the fact that only now,
after more than a decade and a half, have I resolved to
make a cautious statement concerning it. Furthermore,
there is nothing I can cite in favour of my idea beyond its
obstinate recurrence, a recurrence which has taken me
by surprise in all sorts of places, divorced from any con¬
nection with what I might be doing.

What is it that repeatedly presents itself to my mind?

It is this:

The coronal suture of the skull (this would first have
to be investigated) has-let us assume -a certain similar¬
ity to the closely wavy line which the needle of a phono¬
graph engraves on the receiving, rotating cylinder of the
apparatus. What if one changed the needle and directed
it on its return journey along a tracing which was not de¬
rived from the graphic translation of sound, but existed
of itself naturally-well, to put it plainly, along the coro¬
nal suture, for example. What would happen? A sound
would necessarily result, a series of sounds, music...

Feelings-which? Incredulity, timidity, fear, awe-which
of all feelings here possible prevents me from suggesting
a name for the primal sound which would then make its

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appearance in the world...

Leaving that side for the moment: what variety of
lines then, occurring anywhere, could one not put un¬
der the needle and try out? Is there any contour that one
could not, in a sense, complete in this way and then ex¬
perience it, as it makes itself felt, thus transformed, in
another field of sense.

At one period, when I began to interest myself in Ara¬
bic poems, which seem to owe their existence to the si¬
multaneous and equal contributions from all five senses,
it struck me for the first time, that the modern European
poet makes use of these five contributors singly and in
very varying degree, only one of them-sight overladen
with the world-seeming to dominate him constantly; how
slight, by contrast, is the contribution he receives from
inattentive hearing, not to speak of the indifference of
other senses, which are active only on the periphery of
consciousness and with many interruptions within the
limited sphere of their practical activity. And yet the
perfect poem can only materialize on condition that this
world, acted upon by all five levers simultaneously, is
seen, under a definite aspect, on the supernatural plane,
which is, in fact, the plane of the poem.

A lady, to whom this was mentioned in conversation,
exclaimed that this wonderful and simultaneous capac¬
ity and achievement of all the senses was surely nothing
but the presence of mind and grace of love- -incidentally
she thereby bore her own witness to the sublime real¬
ity of the poem. But the lover is in such splendid dan¬
ger just because he must depend on the co-ordination
of his senses, for he knows that they must meet in that

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unique and risky centre, in which, renouncing all exten¬
sion, they come together and have no permanence.

As I write this, I have before me the diagram which
I have always used as a ready help whenever ideas of
this kind have demanded attention. If the world's whole
field of experience, including those spheres which are
beyond our knowledge, be represented in a complete
circle, it will be immediately evident that, when the black
sectors, denoting that which we are incapable of experi¬
encing, are measured gainst the lesser, light sections, cor¬
responding to that which is illuminated by the senses,
the former are very much greater.

Now the position of the lover is this, that he feels
himself unexpectedly placed in the centre of the circle,
that is to say, at the point where the known and the in¬
comprehensible, coming forcibly together at one single
point, become complete and simply a possession, los¬
ing thereby, it is true, all individual character. This posi¬
tion would not serve for the poet, for individual variety
must be constantly present for him, he is compelled to
use the sense sectors to their full extent, as it must also
be in his aim to extend each of them as far as possible,
so that his lively delight, girt for the attempt, may be
able to pass through the five gardens in one leap. As
the lover's danger consists in the non-spatial character
of his standpoint, so the poet's lies in his awareness of
the abysses which divide the one order of sense experi¬
ence from the other: in truth they are sufficiently wide
and engulfing to sweep away from before us the greater
part of the world — who knows how many worlds?

The question arises here, as to whether the extent of
these sectors on the plane assumed by us can be en-

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larged to any vital degree by the work of research. The
achievements of the microscope, of the telescope, and of
so many devices which increase the range of the senses
upwards and downwards, do they not lie in another sphere
altogether, since most of the increase thus achieved can¬
not be interpreted by the senses, cannot be "experienced"
in any real sense? It is, perhaps, not premature to sup¬
pose that the artist, who develops the five-fingered hand
of his senses (if one may put it so) to ever more active
and more spiritual capacity, contributes more decisively
than anyone else to an extension of the several sense
fields, only the achievement which gives proof of this
does not permit of his entering his personal extension
of territory in the general map before us, since it is only
possible, in the last resort, by a miracle.

But if we are looking for a way by which to estab¬
lish the connection so urgently needed between the dif¬
ferent provinces now so strangely separated from one
another, what could be more promising than the experi¬
ment suggested earlier in this record? If the writer ends
by recommending it once again, he may be given a cer¬
tain amount of credit for withstanding the temptation to
give free reign to his fancy in imagining the results of the
assumptions which he has suggested.

Soglio. On the day of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin ,
1919 .